Postcard killers

Chapter 98

Lyndon put two more bottles of beer on the table. Jacob grabbed one of them.

"I didn't think my sources would have much to say about Sylvia and Malcolm Rudolph, but I was wrong," he said, sitting down heavily at the table.

"Are they real y twins?" Jacob asked, opening the bottle. The time difference was helping him feel a little high. He didn't mind.

"Oh yeah, they real y are. Born fifteen minutes apart. Why do you ask that?"

Jacob thought back to the video from the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, how the couple had held on to each other, her hand sneaking inside the waistband of his trousers.

"Don't know," he said, taking a deep swig of beer.

"The real y interesting thing happened when the twins were thirteen."

Lyndon raised his bottle and drank, and Jacob could see his hand trembling. How il was he exactly? He looked bad, which upset Jacob. He didn't have a lot of friends like Lyndon.

"Their parents, Helen and Simon Rudolph, were murdered in their bed eleven years ago."

Jacob blinked.

"Don't tel me," he said. "Let me guess. They were naked and their throats had been cut?"

The FBI agent chuckled. "Precisely. The bedroom evidently looked like a slaughterhouse. Blood everywhere."

"Who did it?"

Lyndon Crebbs shook his head.

"The case was never solved. The father was an art dealer. There was talk that he was transporting more than just Renaissance paintings in the containers he shipped between South America and the U.S., but nothing was ever proved."

The ingenuity of the drug cartels knew no limits. Cocaine and Renaissance art?

"What happened to the kids?"

"Some relative looked after them. My contact thought it was a cousin of the mother's, but he didn't have a name."

Jacob drank some more.

"Sounds like they were pretty wel -off," Jacob said.

"You're not wrong there," Lyndon said. "Their home was evidently some sort of manor house, slightly smal er than the Pentagon. It's empty these days, owned by some bankruptcy agency."

"Is it far from here?"

"Not real y. Just east of Santa Barbara. Why? You thinking of going there?"

"Possibly. Did you get anything on the boyfriend, Wil iam Hamilton?"

Lyndon snorted.

"He was hardly in Rome last Christmas. He's never even had a passport.

He's never been out of the States."

Jacob groaned.

"I've got an address in Westwood," Lyndon said, "but I don't know if it's current. The Rudolphs used to hang out around that area, too. Looks like they studied art at UCLA, started some sort of group cal ed the Society of Limitless Art…"

Al of a sudden Jacob realized that he could no longer sit upright without a lot of concentration. He looked at his watch.

She's just woken up, he thought. The boats are gliding to and from the quays of Gamla Stan beneath her living-room windows, the sun has been up for hours and she's sitting on her sofa watching the sails flap in the wind, drinking coffee and eating a flatbread rol…

"Come on, I'l help you to the sofa," Lyndon Crebbs said. "You don't look so terrific yourself."